Chrome for Android soon to get HDR video support

With the rising number of devices supporting HDR content, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine online browsers and other services adopting its support. Google seems to be operational at the same front and may bring HDR video support to its widely-used Chrome browser.

Although there is no official word on this, a couple of users found the hints of its arrival in some code strings on Chromium Gerrit. The first ‘commit’ suggests that Chrome for Android will be able to “tak[e] the VP9 HDR metadata from the video container and [pass] it to MediaCodec.” As reported by Android Police, the second ‘commit’ says that the mobile browser version may “set color space and HDR metadata in android.media.MediaFormat.”

This indirectly means that the browser will support HDR content if the device supports it.

We are not yet sure when will Google officially bring the support for HDR video content on its Chrome for Android. However, the feature certainly seems to be in the installation so it is safe to say that the feature’s arrival is imminent.

Prior to this month, Google announced the roll out of new ‘protections’ that dig over some unwanted behaviors from websites. One of the issues Google found was that “a small number use the flexibility and power of the web to take advantage of users and redirect them to inadvertent destinations.”

The blog post said that they got feedbacks from users saying that a page will unexpectedly navigate to a new page, for seemingly no reason. These redirections come from third party embedded in the web page. “To address this, in Chrome 64 all redirects originating from third-party iframes will show an infobar in its place of redirecting, unless the user had been interacting with that frame. This will keep the user on the page they were reading, and prevent those surprising redirects,” said Google.